Posted
by
timothyon Saturday February 12, 2011 @12:27PM
from the and-no-coffee-either dept.

theodp writes "At the risk of pulling-a-Groupon, I have a dream that one day my children will not be judged by their e-readers, but by the content of their character. The NY Times' Virginia Heffernan complains that many indie New York City cafes now heavily restrict, or ban outright, the use of Kindles, Nooks and iPads. Evidently, she says, too many coffee shops have had their ambience wrecked when itinerant word processors with laptops turn the tables into office space. Full-dress computers are one thing, says Heffernan, but banning devices the size of books is going too far, and it's anathema to the character and history of cafes. By contrast, Starbucks offers free, one-click, unlimited wireless service to their patrons, making it in Heffernan's eyes 'a flawed franchise that is squarely in the public good.'"

Yes, you can read a book, but at MY cafe, only books that have been handwritten on velum are allowed... I don't allow any of them high-falootin' printing press -produced monstrosities. I demand my customers use the written word as God meant it to be used... produced by monks.

These fools have somehow stumbled their way into ~$11 billion in annual revenue by letting people hang out and use computers. But, any day now, one of those Indies that knows more about running coffeehouses is going to blow them away. Caribou Coffee, with 451 stores, offers much better coffee than that unpopular junk sold in Starbucks' 11,000 locations.

It's really hard to know why anyone would think of emulating a business model as clearly as unsuccessful as Starbucks: